education

His parents say they understand what he did was inappropriate, but are outraged by the way Arvada Police handled the case. The parents do not want their real names used.

They say “Tim” is being treated for ADD and his therapist told him to draw pictures when got upset, rather than disrupt the class. So that’s what he did. Last October, he drew stick figures of himself with a gun, pointed at four other stick figures with the words “teacher must die.”

You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.

And you end up learning ... not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years....

The Parkersville News and Sentinel reports State Sen. Erik Wells has introduced a bill to yank your driver's license if your kid misses 10 or more days of school. You'd get a warning after the fifth unexcused absence.

The Hippo interviews Kevin Bloom, co-founder of The Informal University. The Informal University offers low stress learning of a variety of interesting topics, most sprinkled with the ideas of liberty.

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day -- nearly double the student body at Harvard and Stanford combined. Since he began his tutorials in late 2006, Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.